Looks: Subjectivity as commodity

Abstract

Looking at, seeing, being looked at or being seen by certain people can afford libidinal excitation,1 but it also can be a source of psychical2 displeasure. Reading a series of events, texts, and images, this Article traces why and how we are excited or moved by the way we or others look. The Article argues that seeing or being seen by a sexual object3 is an important source of libidinal pleasure around which a self and culture is built. Consequently, in late racialised capitalist culture, looking, being looked at, and generally looks (and inevitably subjectivities), cannot but become commodities, given that scopophilia4 lies behind the commodification of culture. The Article employs two cases as emblematic of commoditisation in late global capitalist culture: a research fragment about a father who disapproves of his dead son’s dress choices; and second, the media-conveyed controversy around the athlete Caster Semenya. These are approached through constructionist and psychoanalytic registers, here taken as complementary approaches to a critical project on sexualities and gender. The Article demonstrates that the father seems to have looked upon his son as a man in the ‘wrong’ clothes, while Semenya is consciously or otherwise constructed in the media to be a woman in the ‘‘wrong’’ body. These constructions are grounded in the pleasure of looking or being looked at.